PUIAS-arm

PUIAS is a full Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The project is similar to the CentOS initiative, but has been around much longer. It is supported by members of the Princeton University and Institute for Advanced Study computing groups. I have finished compiling the source RPMs for the ARM architecture. The result is a RHEL-like system on the ARM architecture. However graphical use is not recommended and will likely go unsupported for a long while.

To install, download the img file, then insert an SD card into your computer and run:

Thanks go out to Chris Tyler, Paul Whalen, and the rest of #fedora-arm for their tremendous effort in porting Fedora 13 to the ARM arch. Without their hard work (and patches!), this project would not be possible.

PUIAS-arm is currently compiled using mock and gcc on a TI OMAP4430 chip on a Pandaboard. This runs dual-core at 1GHz with one gig of RAM. While this is sufficient to compile most packages relatively quickly, it still takes several weeks to run through the source RPM repository. If you would like to demonstrate your support for this project, hardware donations will be gladly accepted. Currently, I maintain the kernel, u-boot, x-loader, and wl12xx-firmware packages. Support for the Pandaboard hardware is relatively complete, but support for other development boards (e.g. {Beagle, Hawk}Board, {Sheeva,Guru}Plug, etc) could be severely lacking. If you desire a RHEL-like distribution for your development board, again, hardware donations will be gladly accepted.

Please also note a small conundrum that exists at this point. The OMAP4 series is relatively new and kernel/bootloader support is weak at best. I am therefore using the unstable release candidate git repositories for the three custom packages mentioned above. This goes against everything that RHEL/CentOS/PUIAS was built for (rock-solid stability with thoroughly tested software), but is unlikely to change anytime in the foreseeable future. Several experimental kernel features have been enabled, such as HIMEM support for accessing memory >768 megabytes. Currently, this only affects the Pandaboard. If you have a Pandaboard revision EA1 and are experiencing segfaults and SIGBUS errors while attempting to use the system normally, please note that you have a buggy development board and this behavior can be rectified by either disabling kernel HIMEM support, or by passing explicit mem= arguments to the kernel at boot time.

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A blog about network and system security, programming languages, photography, work, random stories, and pretty much whatever else I feel like writing about at the current moment.